Pushed Her Right At Him
“If I can be wheels up in the next 10 minutes, I might beat afternoon traffic, which means I will be in bed within the next hour.”
Lucy looks like she’s ready to pass out right there on the tables in the roll call room. She’s trying to cover it up, not quite looking him in the eye, but he can see the exhaustion written across her face. Tim knows it’s the adrenaline fading, the last few days catching up to her now that the job is done. He can’t blame her; his own plans for tonight involve an ice-cold beer and the football game he’d had to DVR last night after the investigation rolled into more overtime.
It’s a testament to Lucy’s strength that she didn’t crash before now; he’s trained too many rookies who wouldn’t have been able to keep going this long to try and take the credit for that. That said, it’s a testament to his patience that he’d listened to her all day, actually paid attention while she talked about Caleb Wright-with-a-W after the guy had shown up at the station to give her his number.
As much as he thinks the guy is an idiot, that Lucy could do better than anyone who thought he’d have a chance after following a girl from the bar to her place of work – to a police station, of all places – to give her his number, she had seemed excited about going out with him. He knows she’d been disappointed when she’d had to cancel last night.
And he knows that she’s strong enough to keep going for a couple more hours, if she has a reason to.
“That’s a mistake,” he warns her, punctuating the words with a point.
“What? Why?” She looks up from the table, stares at the wall over Tim’s shoulder. She’s trying to fake eye contact, and it just might work, except that he graduated from the same LAPD academy she did – even if there were a few years in between – and he still remembers the nonverbal indicators of deception they’d learned about.
Lucy is tired, clearly, but not entirely off her game. There’s no way it’s actually a mystery to her, why it’s a bad idea to go straight to bed after she’s spent three days hanging out with a literal serial killer. Still, if she’s asking, she must want to know his answer.
Or, she’s trying to stall for a few more moments before she has to leave the station.
Either way, he’ll indulge her.
“Look, after working a hardcore assignment like this, you need to go blow off some steam after shift, you know, give your brain a different focus.” Tim sighs, collecting his next thought as he tries to push against the memories of his own past. He wants to give her advice, not an order. Because he knows this firsthand, has been close enough to where Lucy is that he can remember the pull of exhaustion, the fight to make it as far as falling into bed beside Isabel, the hours tossing and turning as they both tried and failed to actually get any rest. “It’s the only way you have a fighting chance of actually sleeping. Trust me.”
He says the last words like a dare, challenging her to go straight home. The choice is still hers, and if she really doesn’t want to go out, Tim knows she won’t. But she’s heard his answer now, knows why he’s telling her this, and he knows that she’ll make the right decision for what she needs tonight.
“So as my training officer,” Lucy stands, and Tim follows suit, walking with her as far as the glass doors out to the bullpen. “You’re saying that I should go get a drink?”
There's something playful and teasing in her tone that feels like it’s calling out to him, like she’s trying to find a subtle way to ask about his own evening plans.
His first instinct is to blow off the Rams game; it’ll still be there tomorrow, and Lucy is maybe hinting at wanting a drink tonight. He could take her up on it, he knows, without it having to look like anything. Lopez probably hasn’t left yet, Harper might still be around too. If he invited them, maybe found West and Nolan, it’d be easy to write it off as exactly what he’d suggested to Lucy: blowing off some steam after a long few days, giving all of them something else to think about for a little bit.
It would be easy enough, too, to indulge himself for a while, offer to buy her first round, maybe slide her a refill after that. He could find a way to make sure he took the seat beside hers, lean over and whisper something snide to her if some stranger tried to ask what they were all celebrating.
But he wouldn’t want to do any of that if Lucy weren’t there, so the first step has to be inviting her out, clearly and directing asking her to join him (and a few more of their colleagues, if he can find them before everyone has left for the night.
Privately, he doesn’t think it would be the worst thing in the world if they’d all made it out of the division before he got the chance.)
The words are on the tip of his tongue: sure, I’ll even buy the first one. It’s a casual enough suggestion, and given everything they’ve done the last day and a half, there’s no world in which it should be the hardest thing he’s done recently.
But he can’t do it. He can’t bring himself to put the offer on the table, let Lucy feel like he’s somehow expecting this of her. It’s the inherent power imbalance between a training officer and a rookie, he knows, the fear that everything is some sort of a test, on-duty or off. He doesn’t want to pressure her into anything, even inadvertently.
Besides, if they did go out, even in a group, he’d have to spend the whole night making sure he kept himself in check. And he’s tired too. Too tired to trust himself not to get too comfortable around Lucy, to remind himself that he’s got another six months' worth of weekly evaluations to fill out before he can even think about her having any role in his life other than “Boot.”
“A strong one,” he says instead, reaching for the door handle and pulling it open for Lucy to walk through ahead of him. “Maybe even with another human.”
It’s as close as he’ll let himself come to an invitation. If she asks him to join her, there’s no way he’ll say no. But the ball is in her court now, and she’s staring at her phone, tapping furiously at the screen.
Caleb Wright-with-a-W, he’s almost sure of it.
And it’s fine, really. It’s not like they could have done anything more than have a beer and shoot the shit. Besides, he can only keep dodging the Rams score for so long, and he hates knowing who wins before he even starts watching a game.
He’ll see her at work tomorrow.
He’ll see her at work tomorrow.
Except that he doesn’t.
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